


Italia

by itsaquinnquinnsituation



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2014-04-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 06:44:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1418766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsaquinnquinnsituation/pseuds/itsaquinnquinnsituation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The eternal tension between reality and fiction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Italia

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work of fiction, intended for entertainment purposes only. I do not mean to offend or insult anyone. No characters, real or based off real people, belong to me. I am not making money off my work.
> 
> This is my universe and exactly how I see it. Writing should be enjoyed, not judged.
> 
> The text referring to stereotypes or to the city of Venice is not intended to offend anyone.

They say it is one of the most romantic cities on the planet. Bright rays of sun illuminate historical facades, play on the sculptures, shine through the emerald shrubbery, bring smiles onto the faces of kind chatty locals. It smells of coffee, bread, flowers and freshness. The air is infused with sounds of birds, light breeze ruffling the leaves, and occasional clatter of an old trammy crossing the city…

Yeah, right.

Venice was treating him to a nasty light drizzle fourth day in a row, but the streets were still filled with vacationing tourists - rude loud-mouth Americans, neurotic Koreans, self-absorbed French, gloomy Brits and inconsiderate Australians; the crowd was so thick that sometimes he felt like he was losing his own sense of self. The uneven broken pavement was buried under a steady layer of litter; the decaying buildings appeared to be ready to sink through the ground. It smelled of mold and trash and exhaust. 

He felt ready to cry standing in line for the gondoliers and thought about going home and spending the rest of his time in the hotel, but damn, it would have been a whole another pain in the ass to get through the pack of people behind him, all of whom looked like they were ready to murder just to move up one place in the line.

Finally, it was his turn and the gondolier, with a fake, exhausted smile on his rugged, unshaved face and poorly hidden flashes of envy in his washed-out grey eyes, waived at him with his hand. He proceeded forward, but the gondolier kept waiving and calling. So he came over to him and got in the boat, just the feel of getting away from people touching his body, amazing. It was only after he sat that he realized he was not the only passenger.

Green eyes, thick curly hair, white-toothed smile, and he felt his own heart sink, deep, deeper into his belly, as the gondolier was pushing off, saying something, he just stared and stared, unable to look away. 

“I hope you don’t mind. I am also alone, so I thought – might as well.”

Might as well, yes, of course. And that gravelly voice was just like he…

The lad continued:

“D-Do you speak English? Are you a tourist? Sorry, I just feel like maybe we should… I mean since we’re here in this boat…”

That accent was a bit distracting, but as for the rest, the lad really could be…

Instead, he said:

“Yes, yes, I’m a tourist. And you?” 

The curly-haired wonder responded:

“No. Well, not exactly. You see, I am Italian myself, just not from here. I am from a village called Lucera, and now I work close to Brindisi. I am here on a business trip, but I thought, might as well look around before I go home tomorrow morning…” –He smiled, - “And you? Sorry, what is your name?”

“Uh… Lucas.”

“Lucas? Is that English?”

“Not really. Well, maybe. Maybe, I don’t know, it’s a common name. Common for many countries.”

“And what are you… nationality?”

“I’m Dutch. Well, Belgian, if you want to be more precise. My parents are Belgian but I was born in Holland. So I am a Dutch Belgian. Or a Belgian Dutch. As you want.”

“I’m Horacio” – the lad stretched out his hand. Lucas shook it. 

The lad smiled again:

“How do you like it here?”

“Good. Fine. J-just looking around. Seeing touristy things. Yeah. So.”

“How long are you staying?”

“A few more days.”

“Where are you going after this? More travelling?”

“No, going home to Utrecht.”

“Oh” – Horacio considered it, - “So… was the purpose of your trip…” – he laughed, - “Sorry, I don’t know how to say it, so you only come to Venice?”

“Yeah” – Lucas winced, - “It’s…”- he let out a nervous laugh, - “It’s uh…. For my book.... I'm a writer.”

“Your book?”

“It’s set in Venice.”

“Oh” – the lad considered it again, - “What’s it about?”

“It’s… like… the… like two people are running from a mob. H-Have you seen “Plata Quemada”? Watch it. Kinda like that, only they are innocent. It’s a mistake. And they… they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they don’t really know each other, they just get mistaken for two other guys who are wanted by the Italian mob.”

Lucas shot a look at the gondolier and felt his face become red. The gondolier looked at him with a frowned brow. Well, fuck him. 

“Oh”- Horacio smiled, - “I would like to read it. Did you wrote other books?”

Lucas smiled mentally. Usually, he was annoyed by poor English grammar, but at that moment, he didn’t care:

“Yeah, four. They are not exactly best sellers but they brought in enough profit to continue writing.”

“I would like to read it. About Venice… yeah, I would like to read it. Is it nearly done?”

“The plot is nearly done and all the dialogues are written out. But the scenery is lacking because I have never been to Venice before.”

Horacio sighed and looked around:

“But don’t write what you see. This” – he gestured around, struggling with words, - “This is not what you write. You write what you read in other books and what you see on postcards. Everything beautiful.”

“Why?”

“Because people need to keep dreaming.”

People need to keep dreaming. Lucas mirrored him in eyeing the grey canal, then looked back to Horacio:

“This might sound very strange, but you look exactly like one of the heroes in my book. I mean, the way I saw him in my head and then described him. I am not joking. Everything matches, I was even… taken aback… a little.”

“Really?” – Horacio seemed flattered, - “One of your two false criminal guys… that run around through Venice?”

His smile was so naïve and innocent that Lucas tilted his head and smiled in response:

“Yeah. One of the two. But he’s British.”

“From London?”

Lucas laughed:

“I don’t know. I didn’t think that one through. If you want, I can make him from London.”

Horacio nodded:

“Make him from London. I have saw on the picture, red telephone booths and big tall hats on polizia... What is his name?”

“Whose?”

“The guy that’s from London.”

“Oh” – Lucas scratched his head, - “Actually, I don’t know that either. I usually name my characters at the very last moment. Not sure, why. I just like to re-read the whole plot and then make the name fit with the plot and the character.”

“I want to name him. Because he is me but from London. What is the name similar with Horacio?”

Lucas smiled:

“I don’t know? Horace?”

“No, I don’t like. Then everyone knows you wrote about me.”

“I didn’t, I only said that…”

Horacio interrupted him, gesturing:

“What other English name do you know?”

“H… Henry? Or Harold?”

“Harry! I heard somewhere… Oh, Prince Harry! Harry. I like that. Make him Harry.”

“I shall see.”

“And the other one? Is the other one you?”

Lucas felt a nervous pang in his belly. Splashing of dirty grey water. Somebody broke a glass bottle back on the shore. Gondolier. Horacio. Venezia. Is the other one you?

“What?

“No, I mean… like everybody writes a little about themselves. Because you can describe what you feel and it sounds more honest, because you really felt it… sometime in your life… and it’s true… like…do you know?”

Lucas relaxed his clasped hands a little:

“Okay… yeah, I get it. Yeah, if you say so… I guess, the other one is a little like me.”

“Also Dutch?”

“No, also British, like… Harry.”

“What will be his name? It has to be similar with yours.”

Lucas lifted his eyes to the cloudy sky:

“Uhm… Ludo…no, that’s too Dutch…maybe…”

“Louis.” – Horacio said with an unexpected certainty. 

“Louis?”

“Yeah, like… like Louis.”

Lucas considered it and smiled:

“Okay, maybe. Can’t promise you anything, but I’ll sleep on it.”

“What?”

 

 

When they got off the gondola, it did not really end there. They went to a small café to get some coffee, then went visited a few of the landmarks, had dinner and, finally, took a stroll down another canal. 

The sun has already finished setting when they got to the front door of Lucas’s hotel. Horacio stopped square in front of him.

“When do you have to go home to Holland?”

“In three days.”

“I have to go tomorrow early morning. So now I must go to my hotel. I want to… I want to ask you about one thing.” – He looked down.

Lucas felt light-headed and sick:

“Go ahead.”

“About the book. How does it end?”

Lucas shrugged:

“I don’t know, I haven’t finished it yet…”

“No, I mean, does it end, like… like happily?”

“Happily?” – Lucas chuckled, then exhaled, running his hand through his hair, - “You mean like “and they rode into the sunset?” Nah, that’s not realistic. Happy endings are only for cheesy movies. You can’t write a serious novel and give it a happy ending. Nobody would believe that.”

Yeah. Whatever it was that Horacio meant by a“happy ending.”

Horacio looked down and nodded. Then he looked up again and his eyes were moist:

“Can you give me a copy of your draft? Whatever you have wrote already? I want to read it.”

Lucas winced. He considered it. 

“Okay” – he reached into his pocket and pulled out a USB-drive, - “You can have this, I have several copies.”

Horacio took it and nodded, looking down again. They stood in silence.

“You better go, if you need to wake up early” – Lucas heard himself saying and winced.

“Bye” – Horacio said simply, without lifting up his eyes. He turned around and walked away. And Lucas watched him go. Maybe he should have asked him for his email address, or his Skype address or his snail mail address, goddamnit, but this was not a movie. This was not even fiction at all.

“It is what it is,” Lucas thought, struggling with insomnia on a big comfortable hotel room bed, and Venezia was really just a rotting shithole. And Horacio may have looked like the lad that he dreamed of for nights in a row until he finally took to typing, but Horacio was an advertising director from Lucera, who lived and worked in Brindisi, who had to go back home tomorrow and leave Lucas alone in Venice until the latter had to go back home to Utrecht. It was what it was. And Venice was a goddamned swamp.

He spent the rest of his time in Italy in his hotel, scrolling through the pages of his draft, unseeing. On the pages of his novel, two British lads were running around Venice, hiding, escaping, lying, disguising themselves, trying to find the truth, falling in love with each other… Ah, how stupid would they be to be falling in love, Lucas thought. They can’t be seriously expecting that it would end well, because nothing does. Nothing does, except old 90s movies.

 

 

 

Three weeks later he was staring at the blank screen in his home in Utrecht. The Venetian experience left him in no mood to continue writing. He read and re-read the pages of his novel, but could not bring himself to finish it. A mountain of dirty dishes sat in the kitchen sink and his living room was buried under stacks of scratch paper.

He sighed and got off the chair. Washed a few coffee mugs, dusted off the TV, threw out an old take-away and started on going through the mail. 

The last one in the pile was a large envelope with nothing but his own name and address on it. He opened it, frowning, and took out a thick stack of papers. They were covered with text in uneven handwriting. He started reading, stumbling over poor English grammar.

When he got to the words “The End” written in the middle of the last page, his cheeks were completely wet. He wiped his face, let out a breath he was holding, accurately stacked the papers with his shaking hands and held them for a good few minutes longer. Then he sighed ruggedly and picked up the envelope to put them back in it. 

A small piece of thick paper fell out of the envelope.

He stared at it for several seconds, as if afraid to touch it. Then, he bent over and picked it up. He examined it.

Within 6 hours he was on the train.

 

 

They stood on a big hill overlooking the whole city. Everything below seemed miniature, like a Christmas village, swimming in the last bits of light. Their bodies were only silhouettes in front of a huge orange fireball of the setting sun.

“I bet you didn’t expect this kind of a happy ending?” – Harry asked as he put his hands on Louis’ waist.

“Definitely not” – Lucas replied as he wrapped his arms around Horacio’s neck, - “Because this is not a happy ending at all. This is just the beginning.”

 

 

The End


End file.
